Whitewashing America
Subtitle: material culture and race in the antebellum imagination
By: Bridget T. Heneghan.
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Jackson
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
Subjects: American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Race in literature.; American literature -- White authors -- History and criticism.; Material culture -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Human skin color in literature.; Material culture in literature.; Segregation in literature.; Slavery in literature.; Racism in literature.; White in literature.
Description: "Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity." "Along with analyzing physical materials, Heneghan examines the nineteenth-century citizens' increasing concerns with cleanliness, dental care, and complexion. These hygienic concepts, Heneghan argues, became the means by which whiteness was codified as morally superior." "Early nineteenth-century authors participated in this material economy as well, building their literary landscapes in the same way their readers furnished their households and manipulating the understood meanings of things into political statements."

"Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use setting descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville struggled to negotiate messages of domesticity, body politics, and privilege according to complex agendas of their own. Challenging the popular notions, such slave narrators as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white objects to reverse the perspective of their white readers and, at times, to mock their white middle-class pretensions."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-198) and index.
Table of contents: title: The pot calling the kettle : white goods and the construction of race in antebellum America; title: Living on white bread : class considerations and the refinement of whiteness; title: Unmentionable things unmentioned : constructing femininity with white things; title: See Spot run : white things in the rhetoric of racial, moral, and hygienic purity.